Traveling Conversations with my Mother 1

* * * *

I went driving around looking for quilt fabric with my mother today. It was part of my birthday present. My parents are old hands at giving the gift of themselves, and we like it that way. So today was the day out and about together, with a pleasant lunch on the side.

We drive out to a small town in the far reaches of our region to check out a quilt shop rumored to have a decent collection of vintage-y fabric. Flags and bunting are all over the streets from the parade yesterday, clustered thickly in bunches of two and three. Unlike some small towns, the crossroads of downtown are lively and well cared for, small shops and cafes in use, even on a holiday. I happily drool over a few old buildings and their brickwork.

The quilt shop itself is not so large as to be overwhelming, but with lots of nooks to discover. They do even have a section of Civil War and vintage reproduction fabrics--yes! I have an old family scrap quilt to reconstruct and modern prints just won't do.

I pile up potential fabrics and then audition them in batches, putting them through their paces, holding them next to different sections of the original, squint and decide. Being as quick and ruthless as necessary, I throw them into yes, no, and maybe piles.

Some colors seem impossible to find... blue faded to indigo and a burgundy plum red. Most of my finds are either too and bright and colorful or have an appropriate palette but an unfortunately modern print pattern. Some prints might work, but are on too bright of a background. When I lap the sample over the quilt, the contemporary fabric just glows! No, that won't do at all. The fabric has to fit in somewhere in the mishmash of eras represented in the quilt.

We don't know when the quilt was made, or by whom. We only know it came from a family farm. The two sides are subtly different, one more faded and older style fabrics than the other, as if one side was completed more recently than another, but both are machine stitched. We speculate that perhaps an aunt made one side and a niece or daughter finished it. It was certainly made to be warm; the batting was thick and heavy to stand up to a Midwestern winter in a farm house with little or no central heat.

I go another round, compare and contrast. I whittle the massive pile down to six, with extra yardage of a particularly versatile print.

I used this quilt, though frayed, all through college and into my twenties until the fabric started leaking old musty batting. It was becoming a health hazard of sorts. Rather than let the thing molder, I cut apart the remains of the binding (which was already shredding with glee), threw away the nasty innards and gently babied the two pieced tops. They've been in my closets ever since, and now my mother is willing to help me revive them. What a task!

I contemplate my goals here.

I don't want this small part of family history to be trashed. I have some nostalgia for the juxtapositions of different old fabrics, part well-worn farm country, part 20ish teeny classy prints, with a few blouse prints with 50ish squiggles thrown in. And the plaids, oh, the plaids. Some of it sedate, some almost garish.
I want to be able to preserve the pieced tops enough to use them if I want, for either warmth or display. They were never quilted originally and the fabric suffered.

There's a practical side to me, wanting to actually *use* family antiques. If I have old glass plates or salt & pepper shakers, I will keep them in circulation. Silver keeps polished better when used...



I do like a certain old farm style, mostly because of my growing up around farm relatives and the old possessions that never got thrown away (note: Depression era values). I wonder how I will convey that distinct aura of farm life history to my daughter. Not to sentimentalize it-- it's hard and dirty and frugal. You canned and froze the apple sauce you had scraped out of the one apple tree fruit not because it was fun, but because it was part of your food sources, and it was incumbent on you to make every use of your resources.

I have cousins still living that farm life style, albeit with a slightly lesser air of desperation to survive.

Everything all squeaky clean and brand new--what's the fun of that? I like my life with some character to it. But not to hang on the wall... I want my history as a living tradition, not locked away in a display case.

It's a debate that rears its head in other writings and genres. I remember a book--can't remember which one-- in which two adult daughters disagree on how to best honor their mother's quilts. One, still living the rural life, is happy to use them on her own bed and remember the people who made them... The other, the more urbane sophisticate, is horrified that such "valuable antiques" are still in use. She wants the quilts to display in her house, to give them the "proper" respect.

My attitude is somewhere in between. I can't keep the family quilts pristine because they were never pristine when I got them. I can't really refurbish and preserve them perfectly, either. I'm not going to merely lock them away to save for someday, nor hang them on the wall as if in a museum. Well, maybe. I can give them new life, blending a little subtle modern material in the mix to help them survive another several decades or more. And enjoy them meanwhile.

And I can remember the bedrooms where the quilts were in use and the people they kept warm, including my father in his boyhood.

Here's to keeping the past warm while warming the present.

* * * *